Elon Musk built a unique team. Their first results are very encouraging.

I was born in Siberian village number 42. My father died when I was 8 years old. He blessed me and said that I must focus on education. Afterwards, I was growing up in an orphanage.

One has to have a dream, be curious and learn from outstanding people of the world. I am very lucky to have met Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, George Soros, Alvin Toffler, and other incredible individuals.

I must mention that it was Raisa Gorbacheva who told Mikhail Gorbachev about the projects I had done in Siberia and my ideas after reading about them in a newspaper article. I was overwhelmed when he contacted me.

I believe that every person has a unique moment in life when they feel they can achieve anything. The sense I had was not much related to political culture.

I'm not interested in political life. No party in Russia inspires me. I have more hopes about building a civil society. It's important to always be focused on moving in the right direction.

It's good when there is a variety of initiatives across art, politics, and society. There are many art groups and what they do often sparks wild discussions.

Did Pussy Riot have the right to expression? They did. Can their act be considered a form of art? It's an artistic protest. Has their punishment been just? Unfortunately, Russian judiciary is far from being independent.

Their speeches to the court indicate that they are educated, intellectual individuals. Their act turned out to be a test of society and revealed that the church and the state have merged and that judiciary lacks independence.

While space programs had been initially funded with public money and driven by the initiative of the state, they had always been developed by imaginative, visionary people such as Tsiolkovsky, Kondratiuk, Korolev.

Today, there are daring teams with powerful imagination at private companies such as SpaceX and Planetary Resources. While more and more near space missions will be funded, launched, and operated privately, in far space missions in the next decade private companies and public agencies will collaborate to bring about the next breakthroughs.

The new generation of informed, inspired, committed people with an interest to citizen participation is gradually waking up. The new leaders, who would emerge through peaceful election processes from local to federal level, will bring new vision and values and build a social order based on the separation of powers.

Even with a clear political will to promote civil society, creating just an independent judiciary, which is of primary importance for Russia today, would take a generation.

Europe-America 500 space flight was the closest I've ever been to military operations.

Ironically, it was the dream of Russian officers to launch a real rocket towards the US that helped persuade them to commit to the project. For all their lives they had been training and Plesetsk cosmodrome existed primarily to launch military attacks. And to get the US military's permission to do the project, we said that they could shoot the satellite down if it were to miss the agreed touchdown spot in the waters near Seattle. Also, it was the first time ever when foreigners — US diplomats, military officials, CNN crew — were allowed to the secret Plesetsk cosmodrome.

So in part, it was due to military aspirations of the parties that we could do the peaceful project, and convert not only military facilities and technology, but also minds for civil use with the help of private initiative and capital.

By organizing our activities through one of the most popular media in the USSR, we gave over 20 million subscribers an opportunity to submit their ideas, and to support and fund others' ideas. So in a way, it was a social network, albeit based on traditional media.

The satellite that we launched is on display at the Museum of Flight in Seattle for anyone to see.

Steve Jobs, in his commencement speech, quoted the farewell message placed on the back cover of the Whole Earth Catalog: "Stay hungry. Stay foolish."
Many of young Russians are hungry, but Russia is in want of those who are foolish.

In April 1989, I saw a dream that the Soviet Union would collapse. "Who was going to be the President of Russia?" I thought.

To me the answer was clear: Yeltsin. I had not met him by this time yet. I called him, we met, and I invited him to the USA as a citizen-diplomat. He asked me who was the US co-organizer. When Yeltsin learned that it was Esalen Institute, an organization dedicated to personal development, he was surprised they had the courage to do such a project.

I asked Yeltsin what his dream about visiting America was. He wanted to see the Statue of Liberty and a supermarket, and to meet George Bush, Sr.

Yeltsin's biggest shock was seeing an American supermarket near Houston. Before coming to the US, Yeltsin had visited only Nicaragua and Cuba. Yeltsin also had a confidential meeting with Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Yeltsin, who was the leader of Soviet opposition, had traveled around America for ten days, met George Bush Sr., the President of the US, James Baker, the Secretary of State, and others. Thanks to Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika we could return back to Soviet Union peacefully. I remember that I had a t-shirt with text "I survived Yeltsin's trip to America".

When I met Yeltsin in April 1989, he had been a curious person, and communicated openly with anyone. He had not yet been surrounded by people who would later turn into oligarchs dictating governmental policy.

When Yeltsin was in New York for the first time, a journalist asked him if he could describe the state of the Russian economy in one word. Yeltsin replied: Good. Another journalist asked him to describe the state of the Russian economy in more detail, in two words, to which Yeltsin replied: Not good.

I love classical music. When living in Siberia, I founded Terpsichore, a choreographic society. Ballet stars, such as Alicia Alonso, Mikhail Barishnikov, Maya Plisetskaya, Galina Ulanova, Bolshoy Theatre dancers, performed at our invitation.

I had been happy to have founded and headed the Friends of Bolshoy Theatre Club since 1998 through 2001. Nowadays, I'm a member of the Board of Valery Gergiev Foundation, who is the head of Mariinsky Theatre and a great conductor of our time. I want to create a program to support young gifted musicians and opera singers from all over the world, using the power of new technologies.

I believe that new leaders of classical music will inspire the new generation to effect social change through their art.

People have dreams and the freedom to make them true or forget them. I had an idea that the readers of Komsomol'skaya Pravda, a youth newspaper with a daily readership of 20 million subscribers, could submit their ideas for social innovations, so that they would be published in the newspaper, voted for and funded by the people. Thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev's support, the Foundation for Social Inventions of the USSR was established. In just two weeks we received 15 thousand ideas.

One of the ideas that received the most interest and financial support was bringing together the veterans of Vietnam and Afghan wars to help them find ways to relieve the post-traumatic stress disorder. The veterans had met, a network of support was built, and joint enterprises producing wheelchairs and prosthetics were established.

Another idea was connecting Eskimos of the Far East and Alaska. I had been frustrated with the fact that in 1949 Stalin cut off communications between the Far East of Russia and Alaska. The Eskimos families were separated and couldn't see each other even though the distance between the nearest points of the two countries is only about five miles. We established the Foundation for Social Innovations in the US with offices in Juneau (Alaska), San Francisco, and New York. Through a joint venture of Alaska Airlines and Aeroflot, we started direct flights between the Far East and Alaska: Magadan, Anchorage, San Francisco, Seattle, and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. The citizens of USSR and USA could communicate with each other more freely.

Afterwards, we'd continued curing fear through citizen diplomacy. Thousands of people from both countries invited each other while we provided organizational and financial support.

In Soviet Union it was only through direct civil action that social change could be achieved.

I had been inspired with a dream that people would be connected, happy, and free.